The Innovation recycle bin

Time is cyclic, they say. The Sun, moon, seasons, tides, rains, storms, tornadoes and likely the universe itself – they all go and come back again with indifferent precision. There is something beyond the universe which definitely looks like huge unimaginable recycle bin. Similarly, innovation is also cyclic. Old ideas are thrown into a recycle bin and they come out as what we feel as a new idea. What we worked before, we work on again. Its not just déjà vu, but also déjà fait.

I was working on a project in Oracle Fusion middleware. Sitting in the bus back to home, set a train of thought.

That’s an interesting syntax for setting a variable, isn’t it? For 400 years since Galileo, we are used to mathematical notations like:

outputVariable.response = 404

Any one remembers writing in 8085 instruction set? Here is refresher:

MVI A, 194H
STA 2000H

If compilers can understand ‘a = 404’ and if humans can understand that the same ‘a = 404’ really means ‘a = 404’, who are we pacifying with the above xml construct? The only participant that is most satisifed in this complicated piece of assignment is the schema validator. Even the assembler instructions look simpler compared to the xml-instruction set. So we progressed from complicated assembler copy instruction to simpler a = b to a complicated xml <copy> instruction. Innovation is cyclic.

When xmls became a rage a few years ago, every bit of configuration imaginable were ported to xml. We all enjoyed learning Spring xml configuration where we could create classes and reference objects using declarative xml. Suddenly everything was hierarchical. Eventually the limitations of xml was hard felt and out came the non-xml frameworks (Wicket, Rails for eg). Recent versions of Spring, Grails also do not rely on xml anymore as the backbone of configuration. Json and Dsl have made us realize the simplicity of representing data without a purposefully complicated hierarchical structure is still possible. We progressed from non-standard-simple-configurations to standard-hierarchical- configurations-in-xml to standard-non-xml-configurations. Innovation is cyclic.

But again, Json and Dsl go back to a similar format of key=value, just like the properties files. So we have moved from flat-file-properties to hierarchical-xml-configuration to flat-file-look-alike-optionally-hierarchical-dsl config files. Innovation is cyclic.

From Javascript validations to everything-must-be-on-server-validations back to ajax-type-javascript-validations. Innovation is cyclic.

Every data transmitted, whether it is across network, or between circuits, there is always a small amount of control data that is sent along with it. Like source, destination, checksum etc. Yet somehow we bought into the idea of xml – where the size of control data is about like 100 times the size of actual data itself. We have been wasting a huge amount of network bandwidth, sending the same tags for a million records. We wrap 10 bytes of data with about 1kb of tags, so that control data could be ripped off and the actual data be used. Much like an silk-embroidered-golden gift wrap for a lego toy.

Xml is not wrong. It provides a great way to exchange data between two systems when they don’t agree to agree with each other on anything, like a divorced couple. Or a teen and his/her dad. But using xml hierarchy to write a mathematically or logically expressible code like the one above or a similar cousin – the inexplicable-complexity-on-steroids Caml query, superimposing an overtly artificial hierarchy strucuture, where there is only a conceptual linearity, is like asking a husband to do laundry on a superbowl night.